quick ich question

I've seen several fish get sand on them. If the same two specs are there after a few hours of them swimming around it's likley ich

If you start to see more then it is most likely whitespot, if you still only see 2 spots the next day then it could just be something stuck on its slime coat or just a mark of some kind.

my clown looks like it gets WS someimtes too but it tends to go away, stuff gets stuck to them too. i look at my other fish to guage if its something to be concerned about.

I have a side question about that.

I was thinking about getting a skunk cleaner shrimp, I've heard they can cure ick. Is this true? Or do they just help with it or help prevent it?

Cleaner shrimps and cleaner wrasses remove external parasites, whitespot is located just beneath the skin so its not really an external parasite. The cleaner shrimp will try to clean the fish but they won't be successful. So they can neither cure nor prevent whitespot.

When people have found that they added a cleaner shrimp or a cleaner wrasse and the whitespot went away it's most likely due to the fish being healthy and building up natural immunity. Yes it is possible for fish to fully recover from a whitespot outbreak without intervention but it totally depends on the system and the fish species.

The best prevention for whitespot is quarantining new fish.

so was it ich or something else?